My Military Experience – The Terrible Tour Two, part d

I sure did make tons of progress in figuring out just how messed up I was, throughout this whole second tour, and McVader and Varena were only part of that education. McVader left Kunia around November 2000, and although afterwards I was feeling a sense of relief and starting to feel a tiny bit like myself again, I was still dealing with Varena and my passively hostile subordinates who thought I was out to get her, and a few other things besides. I guess the universe decided that since I was still down and out in December 2000, maybe I would like a nice book to read while I was lounging around on the floor. That book was “The Highly Sensitive Person” by Dr. Elaine Aron. I can only assume that being almost at rock bottom was the best place to experience a quantum shift in my self-perception.

The simplest way to describe this book is that it was about me. A little more involved explanation is that Ms. Aron neatly summarized my lifetime of literally feeling like an alien in whatever surroundings I found myself in, an outcast and a freak, and she reassured me that all the highly sensitive traits that made me so weird were actually normal for about 20% of the U.S. population. I had the weight of a lifetime behind my perceptions of myself as a marginal and barely useful member of society. Ms. Aron insisted that I was unique and valuable, that I could live a happy and fulfilling life and also make a meaningful contribution to society because of my gift of high sensitivity. She also commented at some point that the military probably isn’t the best place for highly sensitive people.

The shock that this information produced on my already compromised emotional system was profound; I sought counseling in January 2001. I initially contacted the Kunia chaplain, who informed me that he could only refer me to counseling services if I was suicidal. I wasn’t suicidal, but I really felt I needed counseling, so I had to pretend to be suicidal in order to get help; it really wasn’t much of a stretch, honestly, considering my state at that time. After the first few steps, but before I actually saw a counselor, I started to waver; just deciding to seek help and talking to the chaplain had helped me feel a lot better, and receiving mental health counseling can jeopardize security clearances. I decided to stick with it, though, and I had a pretty good sign that I made the right decision; my psychologist’s name was Tara Smith. Tara Smith had been my deceased sister’s name! I was stunned when I saw her name on my appointment card. Dr. Smith was a wonderful counselor who put a lot of work into helping me build my self-esteem, and she made it clear that she enjoyed working with me. She pretty much ignored the highly sensitive stuff, though (which is rather common, according to Dr. Aron) so I’ve been on my own in trying to navigate that. It hasn’t been too bad; just being able to put some sort of a normative label on my “not like other people” experiences has been enormously helpful.

In addition to the counseling, I managed to do a few other things right during this tour, too. I got a notion in my head to buy my own condo, and that turned out to be a really good idea, especially since I lucked into getting a good realtor (I talked about this in more detail in my “Living In Hawaii – Mililani” blog post). I also managed to find some non-military friends (well, one was retired, a couple were in the reserves, but the rest were civilians) in the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild. I started taking remote viewing (RV) lessons several months after I arrived back on O’ahu, and found myself part of a very interesting group of people. This is something that I hardly breathed a word about at work, even though the president of the guild was a retired Green Beret, and our RV methodology was adapted from the RV techniques used by the Green Berets. People had a low enough opinion of me as it was; I didn’t need to have any woo-woo stuff tacked on to my already poor reputation.

I also started taking geology classes at the University of Hawaii, and really enjoyed them; UH is a great place to study geology! My Geology 101 field trip was to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island (Hawai’i). The highlight of the trip was hiking out to a surface lava flow and playing with molten lava – I wrapped some around a marble, and made my own lava rock. I’ll eventually write a blog post about the Big Island, and you can bet I’ll mention the molten lava bit.

When it came time to negotiate orders for my next duty station, I hoped, but didn’t really expect to stay in Hawai’i. The CTI detailer had made it perfectly clear when I had re-enlisted three years earlier that he would only give me orders for Hawai’i with the understanding that he would send me wherever the hell he needed me when my second tour was up. So I wasn’t too surprised when I called his replacement three years later, and I was told I would probably be sent to Ft. Meade, Maryland (NSA), because those orders were much higher priority than the one available Ru-ling billet down at Pearl Harbor. I said I needed to think about it, and I did, for about ten days. I got out a map of the Washington, D.C. area and looked at all the attractions and thought, wow, I think I’d like to live in that area – East Coast, I’ve never lived there, could be really interesting. So I was looking forward to getting Ft. Meade orders, when I called the detailer back.

I talked to the senior detailer this time, who was in some kind of very strange, generous, and industrious mood, and I told him I was requesting the high priority orders for Ft. Meade, because I knew I couldn’t get the low priority orders for Hawai’i. He promptly offered me the Hawai’i billet. I was so stunned, I stuttered, and asked to think about it for a few seconds, then said hesitantly, sure, I’ll take those orders. I was on the phone with him for about ten minutes as he entered all the info into his computer. He said he was taking care of a lot of stuff, but I didn’t know what he meant. But getting off the phone and telling a few people about it, I didn’t feel elated. I thought about it that evening, and decided to call the detailer back and say, no really, I want the Ft. Meade orders. So I did the next day, but it was too late. He had taken care of everything already. Normally, this process takes a week or two, so this sort of timetable surprised everyone I told the story to. I was locked in tight to the Hawai’i orders after a ten minute phone call.

But wait, there’s more! I e-mailed my next duty station and said I was interested in taking a tour and finding out more about the place. They e-mailed me back and said that my billet was going to get switched to a non-linguist billet, so I’d better call my detailer and find out what was going on. I talked to my detailer, who didn’t know squat about the billet change, and he stated quite firmly that my billet could get switched to MS (cook) and it wouldn’t matter, I would keep those orders. That was a pretty solid commitment, and I made plans accordingly. I had to call the detailer again several weeks later about something, though, and I almost lost my orders – he had finally found out about the billet change through official channels, and tried to talk me into switching to Ft. Meade. I stuck to my guns, though, since I had certainly acted in good faith throughout this whole process. Amazingly, I really did (unintentionally) pull off something that almost never happens in the military – three consecutive tours in Hawai’i.

My third tour in the Navy was, with one notable exception (crappy rotating shift schedule), everything that the second tour had not been. I was surrounded by people who respected me, both personally and professionally; I was treated like a grown-up from day one. All of my co-workers were on their second, third or fourth tours of duty; they were mature, hard-working, really smart people that were always a pleasure to work with. It was a joint command, so I was doing the same job as my Army and Air Force co-workers, instead of working a strictly Navy mission alongside Navy folks. I had no subordinates, and a fairly limited chain of command that pretty much left us watch standers alone. I worked as a respected advisor with senior enlisted and junior intelligence officers.

I had three main challenges when I started my third tour: one, to learn an entirely new job that was only tangentially related to my prior work as a Russian linguist; two, to adapt to a brutal twelve hour rotating shift schedule, which I had never worked before; and three, to shed a lifetime of defensiveness and fear in my dealings with other people. I’ll write about these challenges, and a lot of other stuff, when my military experience series continues, with Part 3.

Divine Mind

musings by Angel